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Many players ofThe Sims 4have at least thought about downloading some custom content (or CC)— player-made clothes, objects, and mods that give your Sim’s world a little more variety. And if you’ve downloaded custom content, the odds are good that along the way you picked up something that didn’t work as intended.
The good news is that most broken custom content can be fixed. You might not be able to salvage every cute outfit but you can always get your game back into a working state. You’ve just got to know what you’re looking at and how to fix it.
Updated August 03, 2025 by Jacqueline Zalace:Dealing with broken custom content can be annoying, and we know that. As such, we’ve updated this guide with a bit more tips to help, including how to deal with CC from the gallery.
What Is Broken Custom Content?
Broken custom contentis any piece of custom content that doesn’t behave the way you’d expect it to. This means anything thatlooks glitchy,doesn’t appearin your game at all, or makes your gamedo weird thingsyou don’t expect.
The effects of broken custom content can be subtle, or far-reaching. Keeping a broken hair in your game won’t do much except make your CAS and Build/Buy menus harder to navigate, buta broken mod in your game can make it unplayable.
How Does Custom Content Break?
To explain how custom content can get broken, first, you need to understand a little bit about how it works. Mostcustom content has three pieces: a mesh, a texture, and some code.If any of these pieces are broken, your CC won’t workthe way it’s supposed to.
You needboth a texture and a meshto make your custom content show up in the game. If there are problems with either, the object won’t display correctly.
Some custom content is justnew textures for Maxis-made meshes(recolors) and others need you todownload anew mesh,so make sure to check.
Most of the time,if your game is crashing, you’ve got a problem with an object’s code. The game can keep on running if it’s missing textures, meshes, or even animations, but if something goes wrong with the code, it’s a lot less likely to play nice.
Functional objects, like beds or TVs, tend to have a little more code attached, telling the game how they work and what animations to play. If your game is glitching or crashing,a functional build/buy object is more likely to be the problem than almost anything else.
Sometimes, custom content will havescriptsattached, but usually, it’sfound in modsthat change a lot of things about how your game works. Scripts area special kind of codethat lets the game do new things. Scripts are really fussy and can be tricky to manage. If your game’s glitching out, and you have script modsthey are an equally likely culprit.
If a mod has scripts, you’ll want toput those scripts in the main Sims 4/Mods folder– do not make a separate folder for them.
Overall, it’s okay if this doesn’t fully make sense to you.You don’t need to be an expert in CCin order to identify when it’s broken or how to fix it.
Back Up And Update Everything First
Before you do anything else, if your game is throwing error messages or you’re getting unexpected glitchy behaviour, you’ll want toupdate your Sims 4 install and all of your mods.
The Sims 4 regularpatches frequently change bits of the game’s codeto make the new content work. This canbreak mods and CCthat rely on the pre-update code. Big script mods like MCCC pretty much always need to be updated, and you’ll want to do that every time the game updates regardless.
Sometimes,an update will change something that you wouldn’t think would be a problem, and suddenly every piece of custom content in a certain category breaks.Windows, doors, beds, and functional objects are most likely to break,but random patches can break things you’d never expect.
If you’re getting errors after patch day,make sure all your script mods are updated for the latest patch.You should also check the Sims 4 forums or Tumblr to see if there’s any known issues with CC and the new patch. With luck, someone else will have found your problem, otherwise wait a couple of days, and check again.
As a rule of thumb, check Reddit to see if there were any patches/updates that conflicted with mods or CC.
Tools To Help Fix Broken Custom Content
The Most Common Forms Of Broken CC And How To Fix Them
These are themost common forms of broken CCand how to identify and fix them.
Cause
Fix
Your Sim is covered in black and white checkerboard boxes and question marks.
Something’s wrong with a CAS object’s textures.You could have downloaded a recolour without its mesh, or maybe a piece of CC needs a mesh from a DLC you don’t have. Alternatively, some of the game’s files might have got corrupted up by an update.
Check any CC you recently downloaded. If you’ve got files you don’t recognize, take them out of your game, and see if that fixes the problem.Make sure any CC you’ve downloaded has a meshand that it doesn’t require packs you don’t own.
If all else fails, repair your gamein Origin or the EA app.
Parts of your sim are missing. They might be missing a leg, their hair, their body, or even their face.
Something’s wrong with a CAS object’s mesh, and it’s not showing up in your game. As with texture issues you may be missing a mesh file or you might have game corruption.
The steps for this arethe same as for texture issues. Check all CC has a mesh and consider repairing your game.
A piece of CC isn’t doing everything the creator said it would. e.g. you’ve downloaded a CC bed, but Sims won’t sleep in it.
There are two basic reasons why this might happen. The first is thatthe object doesn’t quite work correctly.Since custom content is all fanmade, sometimes it’s released in a buggy, broken state. Also, CC creatorsmay not update older objects for newer patches, so when the game updates, the objects break.
The second is amod conflict-two mods that change the same parts of the game’s code can fight with each other. Sometimes, this means one of the mods will stop working; other times, they’ll both attempt to work at the same time, and you’ll get unexpected glitches.
Check yourBetterExceptions logand see what file is likely to cause the problem. Then, check and see if there’s abatch fixfor the object in Sims 4 Studio.
Many common CC errors can be fixed with a simplebatch fix.If there isn’t one, remove any mods or Build/Buy CC you recently downloaded, and see if that fixes the problem.
Your Sims, or the game world, startsdoing things you don’t want them to do. Maybe the UI is glitching out, or when you attempt to load in a world all you get is a white screen.
As with CC that doesn’t quite work; it’s eithercustom content that isn’t working as intended, hasn’t been updated, or is conflictingwith something else.
Againthe fix is the same as CC that doesn’t quite work. Check your exceptions, apply a batch fix if possible, or check content one by one.
The CC you downloadeddoesn’t look like the previewimage.
If you’re playing on an older machine, your CC might not look like the previews due tospec issues.
If you downloadCC that’s meant to be used with something like HQ Modwithout also downloading the mod it will cause issues.
Alternatively,images may use post-processing softwarelike Reshade or photo editors and are not fully representative.
Before you download a piece of custom content, check the post carefully.Check the descriptionsand make sure that you’re not missing any required mods.
Before downloading CC - especially if you’re paying for it -make sure you trust the creator.
Usewell-known modding siteswith a reputation for well-curated content.
Keep Your Mods/CC Well Organized
If you want to make it easy to find and fix broken Sims 4 CC, you need toorganize your mods folder. Organising CC makes iteasier to locate something you know is causing an issue. Options include:
Also, consider aQuarantine folderfor new CC. Put anything new into the quarantine folder, and if you get issues you can easily remove it.
The 50/50 Method
As a last resort, if something in your game folder is broken, and you can’t figure out how to fix it, you can always do the 50/50 method. The 50/50 method has you sort your CC into two piles,and take half the CC out of the game.By repeatedly doing this, you can narrow down what the problem is, and get your game running again ASAP.
Go into your mod manager or your mods folder anddisable 50 percent of the CC in your Mods folder. If you’re using a mod manager, or move it to a folder on your desktop if you’re doing it manually.
Start a new save, and play your game for a bit tosee if the error you’ve been having comes up.For example, if you have a bug that’s making it so that you can’t feed infants, make a family with an infant and have your Sim try to feed them.
If the error isn’t happening, great! You know that the problem file is somewhere in the stuff you just disabled.Take half of the stuff you disabled, andput it back in your game. Doing this repeatedly can help you narrow the problem down to one folder, and figure out what’s making your game balky.
If the error’s still happening, take everything out of your mods folder, and put the stuff you moved to the desktop in your mods folder;repeat the process until you narrow it down.If the problem’s still happening, you might need to wait a few days for the game to update, or reset your save file.
50/50ing your mods can be tedious, but if you’ve organized your game folder well enough, you should be able to find the problem in a couple of hours at most.
Remove All CC
If the problem is bigger than you expected, thenthe best option may be to remove all CC in the game.Of course, this isn’t ideal, but if a large patch really shakes up your CC/mods, you may have no other choice.
Overall, if there is more broken CC than working CC,consider removing all (or most) that you have downloaded and starting fresh.
Yes, but theCC doesn’t actually come with what you download.For example, if you use a family from the gallery with CC in the form of clothing (and you don’t have that CC),you won’t see the clothes.
This can be frustrating if you download something with no indication that it has CC, but thankfully,many uploaders mark if a build has CC or not.In the build above, you’re able to see ‘no CC’ in the title. If you want the CC item anyway,be sure to check the gallery post description.The creator may have listed or linked the CC,allowing you to find and download it.
If you don’t want to download the CC related to something in the gallery, then it’s not meant to be. You’ll need to either find something else, ignore it, or download the CC.
